The qin and tea: Bai Juyi's 'in music I know only Lü Shui; in tea my old friend is Mengshan'

Luoyang, in the Tang dynasty (618–907). An old man sits in the courtyard of his own house. In front of him lies a qin, the seven-string Chinese zither. Beside him stands a small stove, and on the stove a pot of tea is simmering.

He is past sixty. He has held very high office and retired with the rank of Minister of Justice. Now he no longer attends court and no longer reads; "since I stopped reading, old age is idler still," he says. What he does each day comes down to two things: he plays the qin, and he drinks tea. He plays only one piece, Lü Shui (渌水, "Green Water"). He drinks only one tea, the tea of Mengshan.

He wrote a poem about this afternoon. Its title is simply Qin and Tea.

The man is Bai Juyi (772–846), one of the most widely read poets of the Tang, and the poem is where this article begins.

The poem Qin and Tea

Dully I lodge my body among the moving crowd; cheerfully I follow my nature through one life. Since I gave up office, spring finds me mostly drunk; since I stopped reading, old age is idler still. In music I know only Lü Shui; in tea my old friend is Mengshan. In fortune and failure, going and staying, they keep me company; who says I have no one to visit now?

The last line is the key. Someone had evidently remarked that since retiring Bai Juyi had no friends coming and going. His answer: I have, the qin and tea are my friends. The poem puts the two in the same position, and that position is friend. Not a pastime, not a hobby, but a friend, one who "in fortune and failure, going and staying" stays with you whether you are up or down.

Tang: the qin and tea arrive together

The qin is ancient; tea became a drink for the whole country only in the Tang.

Lu Yu's Chajing (茶经, "The Classic of Tea"), the first book ever devoted to tea, was completed in the late eighth century, around the time of Bai Juyi's birth. Before it, tea was a regional drink of the south, and northerners rarely touched it. After it, as a Tang writer put it, "the way of tea spread everywhere": from the palace down to the monasteries people drank tea, and it came to stand beside wine as the other everyday drink. So putting the qin and tea together was a new way of living that the Tang invented. Before Lu Yu, the pairing did not exist.

In Bai Juyi's poems the two often follow one another. In "Boiling Tea by a Mountain Spring, Thinking of a Friend":

I sit and ladle the cool, clear water, and watch the jade-green dust begin to boil. No way to carry a single bowl and send it to the one who loves tea as I do.

And in "After a Meal":

The meal done, I sleep a while; rising, I drink two bowls of tea. I lift my head to look at the sun's shadow: already it slants to the south-west.

The qin in one poem, tea in the next, and an afternoon is gone. Bai Juyi's last years were more or less a string of such afternoons.

What kind of piece Lü Shui was, no one now knows. It was still in the Song-dynasty qin handbooks and was lost after that. Mengshan tea comes from Ya'an in Sichuan; it was a tribute tea in the Tang, and it is still produced today. Of the two things Bai Juyi knew best, one has been lost and the other is still here.

Song: the four idle pursuits

The Song (960–1279) summed up a scholar's leisure in four occupations. Wu Zimu's Mengliang Lu (梦粱录), a memoir of daily life in Hangzhou, the Southern Song capital, says: "Burning incense, whisking tea, hanging paintings and arranging flowers: four idle pursuits, which should not become a burden to the household."

The qin is not among the four, but it shares their space. In Emperor Huizong's painting Listening to the Qin, an incense burner stands in front of the qin table; add a bowl of tea and you have a complete gathering.

Song tea was not Tang tea. The Tang boiled tea: the pressed cake was ground and the powder cooked in water. The Song whisked it: the powder was put in a bowl, hot water was poured over it, and the mixture was beaten rapidly with a bamboo whisk until a layer of white froth stood on top. Whisking was a skill of the hand. Froth that was fine, dense and lasting was said to "bite the bowl". Scholars competed at it, in what they called "tea battles". Like playing the qin, it was something you had to practise.

Su Shi (1037–1101), the greatest poet of the Song, both played the qin and wrote about tea; "fine tea has always been like a fine woman" is his line. Emperor Huizong wrote the Daguan Chalun ("Treatise on Tea of the Daguan Era"), a detailed account of the whisking method, and he also painted Listening to the Qin. For the Song scholar, the qin and tea were two faces of a single cultivation: both wanted skill in the hands, and both wanted stillness in the mind.

Ming: when tea is fitting

Tea manuals of the Ming (1368–1644) began laying down when tea was and was not fitting, in the same spirit as the qin handbooks' "five occasions not to play" and "fourteen occasions to play" (see the solar terms and qin pieces). Xu Cishu's Chashu (茶疏, "Notes on Tea", 1597) lists the "times for drinking":

When heart and hand are at ease; when tired from reading and reciting; when thoughts are tangled; while listening to singing and keeping the beat; when the song is finished; behind closed doors, avoiding business; while playing the qin and looking at paintings; deep in the night, talking together...

Playing the qin and looking at paintings is one of the times for tea.

In Ming painting the player usually has a servant boy nearby boiling tea. Wen Zhengming, Tang Yin and Qiu Ying, three leading painters of the Suzhou school, all paint this arrangement: the master plays, the boy fans the stove, the tea is nearly ready. While you play, the tea is on the fire beside you; when the piece ends, the tea is just ready to drink.

Tea drinking changed again in the Ming. Whisking gave way to steeping: loose leaves in a pot, hot water poured over them, as we do today. The founding Ming emperor Zhu Yuanzhang abolished the compressed tea cakes demanded as tribute, loose-leaf tea spread, and the steeping method has been fixed ever since.

A particular afternoon

Put the Tang, Song and Ming material together and you can reconstruct a scholar's "qin and tea" afternoon.

Early afternoon, a guest arrives. The host has the boy light the stove and set water to heat. The water should come from a spring or a well, and it is brought to the point where the bubbles like "crab eyes" have just passed and the bubbles like "fish eyes" are about to appear; that is the first boil. A little longer is the second boil, and that is when the tea goes in. While the water heats, the host takes down the qin and tunes it; the guest looks at the paintings and chats. The tea is ready. First a bowl, to wet the mouth and settle the mind. Then the host plays a piece; the guest listens; the tea cools beside them. The piece ends, another bowl, a few words about the music. Then the guest takes a turn at the qin.

The shape of the afternoon is tea, qin, tea, qin. Tea brings people in from outside; the qin takes them further inward; tea brings them back out a little, enough to talk. The two alternate, and the afternoon passes without anyone noticing, until, in Bai Juyi's words, "I lift my head to look at the sun's shadow: already it slants to the south-west."

A qin society's gathering today keeps roughly this shape. Only the water no longer comes from a spring, and the stove is an electric kettle.

Why these two

The qin and tea came together because they are alike.

Both are light. The qin is quiet and tea is mild; neither is a stimulant in the ordinary sense, and both have to be approached in stillness before they can be tasted at all. Both are slow. A piece takes a quarter of an hour of sitting; a pot of tea waits for the water to boil and then for the leaves to open. Both wait on a moment. The qin has its "breathing points", the pauses between phrases; tea has its "water moment", the right temperature for pouring. In each case you wait for the right instant: the player waits for one note to die before sounding the next, the tea-maker waits for the water to reach the right heat before pouring. And both can be done alone, and are better with a few others.

There is one layer more. Neither of them solves a problem. The qin cannot be eaten; tea does not quench thirst (plain water does that faster). Their whole value lies in the little that is extra: the extra sound, the extra flavor. Scholars called this xian, leisure, idleness. Bai Juyi's "since I stopped reading, old age is idler still" is the point: only when one is idle do the qin and tea appear.

And the reverse is also true: the qin and tea create idleness. A busy person who sits down to make a pot of tea is idle for the minutes the water takes to boil; one who plays a piece is idle for that quarter of an hour. The qin and tea are the knives that cut leisure out of a busy day.

Today

Hardly a qin gathering today is without tea. A group sits in a circle; one person plays while the others drink and listen; when the piece ends, someone else plays, and a fresh infusion is poured. The picture is not far from the Ming paintings.

In 2022 UNESCO inscribed "traditional tea processing techniques and their associated social practices in China" on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The guqin had been inscribed in 2003. Nineteen years apart, the two entered the same list. On the craft of tea-making itself there is a separate article, Chinese tea.

Bai Juyi's "in fortune and failure, going and staying, they keep me company" means that the qin and tea followed him through his whole life. A person who has two such things does not have a bad life. You need not become Bai Juyi, but you can try his afternoon: one qin, one pot of tea, and the length of one piece.